NUMERACY BENCHMARKING

There are many learning progressions that show the development of reading and mathematics.  Nowhere in the world has defined a benchmark for literacy or numeracy that defines what an adult needs to have to usefully contribute to the community in adult life.

The literacy benchmark programme is well under way with focus groups responses favouring one particular passage and a survey of about1000 people being conducted to get a city picture.  This is also benchmarked to actual known student reading ages for some 200 plus individual students.

The next task is to attempt to define where the Mathematics benchmark should go and how we could assess that level given some overarching considerations. 

• The "test" is to be able to be administered by a non-Mathematics specialist.
• Needs to be aural so any reading difficulties are negated. (Assume they can hear) and also so they don't use any writing or calculating aids.
• Needs to be single sheet and done in less than 5 minutes.
• It is only to be a preliminary screening tool that can be done in malls, public places etc to determine who needs help, then other assessment tools are put in place so that appropriate remedial action can be offered.
• Needs to focus on important strand(s), and not cover every strand. Research would appear to suggest that to be able to progress to higher level thinking skills, a person must be multiplicative (as defined in the Secondary Numeracy Programme). Therefore a focus on that as a benchmark is probably appropriate.

          Concentrating on money for this benchmark seems to cover all of these options.

• Other demographic information needs to be gathered to ensure that proportionate groups are surveyed - compared to the literacy benchmark surveys.

A wide ranging group of Mathematics educators were consulted including numeracy facilitators and assessment experts such as Warrick Elley and Des Rainey.

Quite a few trials were considered until in the end we decided to go with a single test based on money.  This is still a work in progress, but it has been aligned with the numeracy project